Over time, we will probably get smarter about online sharing. But right now, we’re pretty stupid about it. Perhaps this is because, at some primal level, we don’t really believe in the internet. Humans evolved their instinct for privacy in a world where words and acts disappeared the moment they were spoken or made. Our brains are barely getting used to the idea that our thoughts or actions can be written down or photographed, let alone take on a free-floating, indestructible life of their own. Until we catch up, we’ll continue to overshare.

There is more than one #narrative that guides the services provided by psychology to the military and its soldiers. The dominant narrative is that wars happen and that a peaceful but powerful nation such as the United States responds to the aggression of other nations or groups using military force when diplomacy or other efforts at persuasion are not successful. This view presumes decisions to engage in war emanate from decisions by democratically elected officeholders to protect us. War requires a great mobilization of technology, supplies and soldiers. Soldiers are recruited for such patriotic service and undergo serious physical and mental challenges, some continuing long after the time of service. Within this framework the sacrifices are justified and the building of psychological resilience for soldiers—as described in an entire issue of the #American_Psychologist dedicated to #Comprehensive_Fitness_Training makes perfect sense. “The program’s overall goal is to increase the number of soldiers who grow through their combat experience and return home without serious mental health problems” according to Michael Matthews, a professor with the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

There is however another narrative that casts the contributions and responsibilities of psychology to the military in a different light. In this perspective violent eruptions occur because some people are deprived or displaced and see no non-violent options to improve the quality of their lives. They see control over the resources needed to make their lives better as increasingly centered among a relatively small group of brokers of concentrated power and wealth. It is the decisions of this elite group, according to this second narrative, that necessitate violence and suggest a common root underlying war, poverty and environmental destruction. Resource depletion now causes or intensifies most overt conflicts, and serious global malnutrition affects 925 million people. Such structural violence is neither accidental nor inevitable. Rather it is, in this narrative, a natural consequence of a system inordinately influenced by a small, interconnected network of corporate, military, and government leaders with the power to instill fear, to increase their excessive fortunes, and to restrict information, particularly about their own clandestine dealings. With the predictable benefits of violence going to a small set of corporate and government officials, the recruitment and motivation of soldiers, and of the public, requires a measure of concealment or deception as to who will pay what costs and who will receive what benefits. In this view the sacrifices required from soldiers not only go well beyond what resilience training may prevent, but are not justifiable in the first place. This second narrative calls psychologists to different tasks. They are to draw attention to voices that have been excluded, to clarify the deep psychological and social consequences of the dominant narrative, and to illustrate for people who have been adversely affected, the ways to resolve conflicts without recourse to killing.

The resilience training program flags a larger concern that the discipline of psychology needs to come to grips with the implications of its involvement in facilitating the psychological preparation for war.

November122011

Uploaded by theRSAorg on Oct 21, 2011
In
this new RSAnimate, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist
explains how our 'divided brain' has profoundly altered human
behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain
McGilchrist as part of the RSA's free public events programme. To view
the full lecture, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUHxC4wiWk

When I read this comic, I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Brave New World:

“It’s
curious,” he went on after a little pause, “to read what people in the
time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed
to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely,
regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth
the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True,
ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great
deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and
happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness
keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t. And, of
course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was
happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite
of everything, unrestricted scientific research was still permitted.
People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were
the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years’ War. That
made them change their tune all right. What’s the point of truth or
beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
That was when science first began to be controlled–after the Nine
Years’ War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled
then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since.
It hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. But it’s been very good
for happiness. One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got
to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you
happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested
in truth; I paid too.”

And:

There
was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was,
passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of
the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a
round peg in a square hole. //

-------------------------

oAnth:

this entry is part of the OccupyWallStreet compilation 2011-09/10, here.

September092011

“

[...]

(T)hese companies build the appearance of a “social network” to serve as the means by which all contexts and competencies of a social network may be controlled for profit and, whenever there is conflict between sociability and profit, sociability loses.

Ordinarily, this would not constitute a threat to sociability itself; after all, traditionally, this scheme of effort has been known by many names: country club, member-only society, etc; the places that striated a culture or society, mandate and maintain concepts such as “class” while working in opposition to concepts like “class mobility”. (This, mind, is a classic dynamic within humanity.)

However, for the first time in our history, we have companies whose technological presence and degree of proprietary involvement in our primary vehicle of global sociability combines with their fundamentally anti-social motivations result in “social networks” that appear to promote decimation of traditional modes and models of exclusion and the anti-social, and appear to support promotion of “social networks” as the means to do so but, in actuality, are promoting an entirely new era of classism by reshaping the criteria not only for admission to the social arena, but for consideration as being worthy of involvement in the social discourse at large.

September012011

(Y)ou are succumbing to the illusion
of asymmetric insight, and as part of a flatter, more-connected,
always-on world, you will be tasked with seeing through this illusion
more and more often as you are presented with more opportunities than
ever to confront and define those who you feel are not in your tribe.

May072011

Researchers testing mental illness figured out how to induce schizophrenic symptoms in a computer, causing it to place itself at the center of crazy delusions, such as claiming responsibility for a terrorist bombing. The results bolster a hypothesis that claims faulty information processing can lead to schizophrenic symptoms.

Computer scientists at the University of Texas-Austin built a neural network called DISCERN, which is able to learn natural language. The humans taught it a series of simple stories, teaching it to store information as relationships between words and sentences — much the same way a person would learn a story.

Then they started again, but cranked up DISCERN’s rate of learning — so it was assimilating words at a faster rate, and it was not ignoring as much noise in the data.

Some mental health experts believe schizophrenics cannot forget or ignore as much stimuli as they should, which makes it difficult to synthesize and process the correct information. This “hyperlearning” phenomenon causes schizophrenics to lose connections among individual stories, losing the distinction between reality and illusion. Dopamine is a key factor in the process of understanding and differentiating experiences.

Telling the computer to “forget less” was akin to flooding the system with dopamine, confounding its ability to discern relationships between words, sentences and events, according to a news release from UT.

“DISCERN began putting itself at the center of fantastical, delusional stories that incorporated elements from other stories it had been told to recall,” according to the news release. In one answer, it claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.

The experiment doesn’t prove the hyperlearning hypothesis, but it does lend it additional credence, according to the researchers, who published their crazed computer findings in the journal Biological Psychiatry. It also shows that neural networks can be a useful analogue for the information-processing centers of the brain, according to graduate student Uli Grasemann, who participated in the research.

“We have so much more control over neural networks than we could ever have over human subjects,” he said. “The hope is that this kind of modeling will help clinical research.”

April292011

Péter Zentai of HVG had a fascinating interview with Jerrold Post a couple of days ago. The Hungarian journalist wanted to know whether there is a general portrait of dictators that is independent of time and space.

Post answered in the affirmative. "The psyche of all dictators, terrorist leaders, mafia chiefs has four essential components. The first is a messianic belief in their own destiny. The second is a type of paranoia. The dictator-types blame others for their smallest failures and are constantly trying to find or create enemies. The third is a limited conscience and hence a lack of inhibition that often originates in problems that weren't handled in childhood. And fourth is an uncanny ability to influence and possess the mind and soul of people in their closest circle."

When Zentai inquired about the intelligence level of these dictator-types, Post's answer was that there are some who are clever or intelligent and some who are not, but "almost all of them are half-educated." All dictators believe that their pronouncements are terribly important, while listening to them from the outside one can see the inner contradictions and outright stupidities. Their penchant for creating enemies can also be found in their public speeches where at the center of their ire is their or their country's enemies. Their attitude toward "these enemies" becomes obvious not only in words but also in gestures. For example, they often make their visitors wait or they arrive late for an important meeting only to show who is boss.